


hm. Voltron

by faezer



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: M/M, Post Season 3, Pre Season 4, space is scary, tag team adventure, tags are hard okay, there's some blood
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-05
Updated: 2018-04-05
Packaged: 2019-04-18 15:54:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14216604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faezer/pseuds/faezer
Summary: The adventures of two paladins in whole new worlds, full of curiosities, wonder, and head trauma.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I had a wonderful spur of motivation at 4 am for a few days to write this, and sadly that muse has left me since. I've decided to post this anyways. Enjoy being baited by an unfinished story.

All he could see was darkness, flecked with stars that spun and whirled relentlessly across his line of sight. The cockpit was dim, lit only by a few flickering blue lights and the glow from his suit, and Blue was not responding to his commands, no matter how frantically he jammed and mashed every damned lever and button on the control panel. She was there, definitely, but she was not coherent, not at all the soothing presence he'd come to know. In an instant she'd be booming in more force than he'd ever felt, so loud that he couldn't hear himself screaming into the comms, like she was consuming his mind - and in the next moment gone to but a whisper, a strange and distorted voice, a childlike presence questing tentatively into the unknown. In those moments, she did not know who he was, and that scared him. It scared him more than her screaming that racked his brain seconds later. He slammed his fists down on the control panel in exasperation, looking out at the vastness of space and the blur of stars. He couldn't make any sense of where they were, no one was responding in the comms, and the spinning lights before his eyes were sending waves of nausea through his body. They were tumbling head over heels through space and he could only pray they didn't hit something. A giant asteroid, another ship, a small asteroid, a moon, hell, any size of astero-

The main lights of the cockpit flashed on. Everything was silent for a moment, all but his erratic breathing and the shrill creaking of Blue's metal body. The pseudo-quiet was cut short by a grinding and whirring of machinery that sounded far off, from the hind of the ship, and the spinning visual of space began to slow. It eventually curbed to a halt, leaving him to stare out at, well, what do you know, blackness and the pinpricks of stars that dotted it. He let out a half-laugh, half shuddering exhale. It was like the calm after a storm. His hands were shaking from adrenaline, heart beating so quickly and loudly that he could hear it. But that was all he could hear. Blue was gone. She'll be back, was his immediate thought. He collapsed back in the pilot's seat, not recalling when he'd stood up from it, and tried not to lose himself. He took a deep breath and let it out, hands resting on the controls once more. First step, assess the area. As well as you could manage to assess outer space, that is. He navigated Blue to the left, hoping to see, against all hope, the Castle of Lions, or maybe one of the other lions themselves. At the very least, a planet. Blue did not turn to the left. He shifted his grip on the steering handles and bit his lip. Blue? He sent the question adrift, to anywhere and everywhere, because he couldn't find his connection to her mind, couldn't focus his thoughts to her. 

There was no reply. The silence seemed to grow with every second, and with it came anxiety. Space. Very quiet. Very lonely. Blue was gone. His hands were shaking harder, and he let them slip from controls and onto the sides of his helmet as he stared out into the void. But...the ship was running, the lights were on, and she'd, something had triggered the boosters to level them out of that tailspin. If that hadn't been Blue, he didn't know what it could be. She was here, she had to be. Was she...hiding from him? Blocking him out? The thought of it crushed him. He let out a breath he hadn't known he'd been holding, and then his heart dropped. At the corner of his display, a hunk of dull crimson and flickering light had emerged from the darkness. It was making its way across his field of vision at an alarming pace. Keith, he thought. It was difficult to make out the shape, the colour was so muted by lack of light that he could be mistaking it for red, but - but the ship had already traversed the span of his display and was gone from sight. Recovering his wits, he opened his mouth to start screaming into the comm, but then thought better of it. He would be composed. He would speak calmly, levelly. 

"Keith?" he said, shrilly, complete with a cracking voice. He cleared his throat.

"Keith, Keith, hey buddy, hey Keith, my man..." He got into the rhythm of it, spouting off "hey Keith"s, this and that, and is it bad that rambling on and hearing his own voice was somewhat comforting? Though it'd be much better if he heard Keith's, and boy did he regret giving birth to that thought. But really. Nothing but silence on the other end. Was it not Keith? Was he ignoring him? Comm's out? Keith could be an asshole, but was he the kind of asshole to just leave him stranded out here without so much as a word. What the hell was he doing?  
"...hello?" He anxiously tapped the side of his helmet. "Testiiing, one two, one two..." Tapped his foot. "...fucking..." Picked at his armor. "KeiaaAA-" The edge of the seat jammed into his ribs as he was thrown violently to the side, Blue was rumbling to life, and then she was off like a predator on the scent of prey. He could hear her machinery working into overdrive, fully alive, fully functioning. But he couldn't hear her. Lance drew up from his huddled position, shoving the pain in his side from his mind as he looked up at the display. Dead and center, that small, maybe-red, maybe-Keith blot in the distance. It didn't appearing to be growing smaller; it seemed that they might even be gaining on it, which spurred a sense of pride in Lance that Blue could keep up with Red, if that is who it was, Red, the supposedly fastest, most agile of the five. 

The five. Hunk, Pidge, Shiro. A fresh wave of dread hit him, fear and worry for them, and loneliness for himself. Blue was chasing after this thing that might not even be Red like a rabid animal, probably wasn't Red, probably wasn't Keith, probably would never see any of them again, because let's be honest, how the hell do you find any one person in the vastness of space, and he'd never see his family, and no, no. Not going down this train of thought. Not doing it. Hunk and Pidge are geniuses, and even if they were stuck in the situation he was, they'd definitely been reading up on Altean technology and could probably find some way to rig up a solution. Shiro, experienced, levelheaded, in control, and probably the one with the best bond with his lion. Allura and Coran would be fine, Castle of Lions at their disposal, and they would be looking for them. And Keith was right here, that was the red lion, Blue would catch up to them and Keith would see them and be all "oh hey I didn't see you before when I was flying by like a maniac and my comm is broken so, ya know." He let himself believe it, for now. 

Now that Lance thought about it, out of the five of them, he and Keith were likely the ones who needed the most not to be alone. Sure, Lance knew Keith was a skilled pilot and fighter, but he was also incredibly skilled at heedlessly throwing himself into death traps. He needed someone to keep him in check. And Lance, he was capable, adaptable, a quick thinker with a penchant for spur of the moment strategy - but being alone scared the shit out of him. He knew he could survive it, even if it broke him. He didn't want to break. But then he thought again of Hunk and Pidge all alone, how Hunk cried openly in tense situations, but would have no shoulder to cry on, and Pidge, strong-willed yet still so young and vulnerable, who'd already lost one family. How Shiro had moments where his mind seemed to drift to a different world, stuck in some private hell that was inflicted on him by the Galra. It was a punch to the gut. He turned his attention to the screen. 

Red was definitely closer now. He squinted at the display. He hadn't noticed it before, but there was a thin and faint crescent of light, very large in diameter, which they were heading towards. A planet, or moon, he guessed. The sun must've been casting a shadow on this side, almost obscuring it completely. Well, here's hoping it's a terrestrial planet, preferably with a non-toxic atmosphere and without bone crushing gravity, habitable for life that won't want to kill us on sight, things Keith probably hadn't considered at all before speeding straight for it. At the breakneck pace they were keeping, it took only a few minutes to breach the atmosphere, and as turbulence wracked his body and lion, a thought occurred to him. What if Keith wasn't in control of his lion, either? Shiiit.

Maybe he should try the comm again. Could have been out of range last time, he wasn't really sure how much distance these things covered, or maybe there had been some kind of interference, he didn't really know, but it was worth a shot. 

"Keith?" he tried. God, he'd said that name so many times in the past twenty minutes it was starting to sound foreign on his tongue. 

"Keith...if you can hear me..." Lance focused his gaze ahead, trying to make out any details of the planet's surface. It was so dark he couldn't even tell if they were still passing through layers of clouds. "If you can hear me, say 'Lance is a better pilot than Keith.'" In fact, he vaguely wondered if Blue would even be able to make a good landing, because he was betting that he for one wouldn't be able to see the ground even if it hit him in the face. Which was now a possibility. Blue, being a feline, surely could see in the dark. Or had some fancy ultrasound features. Surely. He trusted her, she knew what she...the comm crackled to life for a moment, only to transmit a small...grunting? noise and cut to silence again. A groan? It was a something, and a something was much better than a nothing. It both relieved and worried him. 

"Really? You let me talk to myself for like ten minutes, and when you finally deign to respond, all you do is grunt at me?" Lance threw up his hands, despite the gesture being utterly futile with video feed not activated. That was a mistake which he quickly rectified. Even Keith was deserving enough to bear presence to his beautiful face in such times of need. His beautiful, and glaring, face. Fierce, like Tyra. The lack of response on the other end was worrying. There was definitely something wrong.  
"Alright, be that way, all good. Just wanted to let you know, I'm here, but uh, Blue isn't, exactly."

A few shuffling noises filtered in, like the rustling of cloth against cloth, and maybe some breathing. Good to know.

"Can you still talk to Red?"

Barely audible grumbling that Lance couldn't for the life of him decipher. 

"Keith? Talk to me buddy, how are we doing in there?" 

More shuffling noises, gratingly loud as though he was rubbing his fingers all over the mic, and then one final shhhfff to end it. It sounded suspiciously like he was putting his helmet on. Like he hadn't had his helmet on this entire time. And Lance truly had been talking to himself for ten minutes. Why in the everloving quiznak...

"Lance?" His voice was deep and groggy, like he'd just come out of a ten year coma. Lance was going to put him in a ten year coma as soon as they landed for making him worry over nothing when there were much more legitimate things to be worrying about.   
"The one and only," and, as Lance was saying this, there was a deafening roar from the other end, so loud that had him practically flinging his helmet across the cockpit. Instead, he held it a safe distance from his head, cradled in his hands, listening to the screeching metal and booming rumbles that bellowed from it. He felt sick, a twisted, sinking growing in his gut.

Bad landing.


	2. assessing the damage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> this is it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> u/f..maybe one day

The minute it took them to touch ground was agonizing. He paced the cockpit, babbling incessantly into the comm to no avail, knowing he should probably be preparing for impact lest he have a similar fate as Red and Keith, but he trusted Blue, he did, and it was driving him up the wall that Keith was down there, maybe dead, maybe breathing his last, while Lance was stuck here unable to do anything about it. There was a soft rumbling from beneath his feet, Blue's descent smooth as water, but smothering the relief of a successful landing was a fresh shock of panic rolling through him, because wait – what the hell was he going to do? What could he do? But he was already pressing the button to unhinge the hatch of Blue's jaws because she was taking too. Damn. Long. 

Nothing happened. He froze for a moment, his line of thought abruptly halted, and then he jammed his finger on the button over and over. “Come on, come on...Blue, please,” he pleaded, despite the wary feeling that the only person or being that could hear him was himself. He recalled the manual escape hatch Coran had pointed out during his informative, and longwinded, tour of the lions' interiors. It opened from the ceiling of the cockpit, and Lance could just reach it using the pilot's seat as a support. Not bothering with frustration as to just why it was so out of reach, he worked on undoing the wheel lock. 

There was a hiss as air and dust streamed in through the cracks in the opening hatchway, and when the handle refused to turn anymore he shoved the door up and out, revealing clouds and clouds of dirt illuminated by the synthetic light streaming from the inside of his lion. He caught the edge of the exitway and hauled himself gracelessly out. Not far off, glows of yellow and blue light peered meekly from behind the smokescreen of dirt. 

Judging from the light, Red was not far off.

Getting down from the head of his lion was an ordeal, scaling from ledge to ledge of the landscape of Blue's cheek with only the gleam of her eye to guide him through darkness. The whole way was a struggle with his adrenaline-shot body, trembling and unmanageable, like his limbs didn't belong to him. Fatigue was latching onto him as he slipped up his footing and slid the final stretch down the side of her skull, and he panicked, letting out a dignified yelp because he was pretty sure Blue was standing upright which meant he was about to fall eighty feet or so to his either relatively painless death or very painful broken-legged almost death.

He landed shortly, though, almost busting his ass on the smooth metal of what, after shooing dust from the site and using his bayard as a craptastic flashlight, he surmised was a paw. He gingerly slid his legs over the edge and touched ground. Hard ground, littered with small rocks and pebbles that he was sure had a life mission to make him trip and sprain his ankle in the future. Heedless of this, he set off at a mindless sprint that threw caution to the wind, images flitting through his mind. Fractured bones, lacerations, bruising, dislocation, burns? An unexpectedly very mortal Keith lying broken on the floor. 

The ground vanished from beneath Lance's feet and he was suddenly crashing downward at an awkward angle. His left foot was still caught on the edge of the outcrop he'd stumbled off, and it twisted his body into a nose-dive. The ground slammed into his knee, eliciting a growl of pain, but he managed to catch himself with his hands before his face met the same fate. His arms buckled quickly and he rolled onto his side, clutching his leg to him because his knee was screaming at him and he was screaming curses back at it and at fate and the universe itself which in this moment did not deserve to be saved by Voltron.

He grit his teeth and hoisted himself on his hands, careful to favour his injured knee, and began a measured crawl down the slope that presumably led to Red. As he neared her massive head, the light from her eye slipped from his line of sight and he was left in near darkness. It was bayard-flashlight's time to shine, Lance thought, as there was never an inappropriate moment for a pun. Unfortunately, bayard-flashlight was not yet prepared for its road to stardom, as it nervously revealed to him a whopping one foot of ground in all its dust-obscured glory. Twenty seconds later, he came upon a wall of metal. With his face. Yes, bayard-flashlight would soon be announcing its early retirement, from whence it would be shunned from the societies of all good flashlights worldwide. Lance rose to his feet, or foot, rather, and began hop-sidling along the side of the wall to try and figure out just what part of Red he had stumbled upon. 

Red's eye snuck into view again as he reached what appeared to be the top of her snout, which concluded Lance's theory that she was laid out on her side, which meant that if he turned this corner, he'd be at her mouth, which he had no idea how he was going to get into, except, as rounded the bend, he realized that wouldn't be a problem. Red's jaws were gaping open. Dim backlight flitted from within, and it looked like the entrance to some otherwordly cave. 

The dread he'd been suppressing until now came crawling back. He willed himself forward before he could address it. The dust clouds were thinner here. Crushed and contorted metal peeked from the edges of the cockpit, scraps of steel torn from the interior rested hidden amongst the rock rubble that littered the ground. 

It was so eerily silent that his voice instinctively dropped to a whisper. “Keith?” Below the pilot's seat, which hung several feet above and parallel to the ground, laid a body face down and clad in red and white armor. The pain in Lance's knee was forgotten and he was at Keith's side in a matter of seconds. With shaking hands, Lance turned him over. He didn't want to see this. 

The worst part of it was that he couldn't understand what he was seeing at first. The glass visor of Keith's helmet was almost completely shattered. Pieces of glass were scattered across his face and embedded in places, glittering among trails and smears of still slick blood. The patches of skin where blood had not yet touched were an angry red colour, as though they'd been rubbed raw. Unseeing, indigo eyes stared at Lance from beneath half-closed lids. Lance was yelling. Fuck, fuck. Oh fucking god. He recoiled instantly, turned his head away so fast he almost had whiplash because he couldn't bear to keep looking. His hands were all over the place, wrapped around his sides, rubbing on his thighs, because he didn't know what to do with himself, because he was trying to think but the image was ingrained in his mind as he paced back and forth beside Keith's body.

It was getting hard to breathe, so he focused on that. And then...was Keith alive? Was he alive. Of course he is, Lance thought frantically as he pressed his fingers to Keith's neck. And he let out the breath he'd been holding, unfounded relief filling him because, of course Keith was alive, he could never doubt that. It was difficult to make out a pulse due to his hand being gloved, but he was sure he was not imagining it. Okay. He still didn't know if the air was safe to breathe, Keith had no helmet to filter out any toxins, he needed to get him to Blue. There were too many reasons why there was no way in hell that was going to work out. Noted as another problem for Future Lance. Did he have any other injuries? A quick once-over showed nothing of obvious suspicion. His gaze shifted timidly to Keith's face. It probably wasn't as bad as it looked. Things always looked worse when they were coated in blood and grime.

With as much delicacy as he could manage, he pulled off the damaged helmet. Keith's eyes were still staring out at nothing. It was unnerving, one of the most unnerving parts of it all, despite everything else. He wanted to close them but he was scared to touch him at all. Panic reared its unwelcome head again in the face of his moment of hesitation and without thinking he tugged a shard of glass free from its place above Keith's lips. Fuck, wait – he needed something, like bandages, or something to stop the bleeding. He watched a fresh trickle of blood well from the wound before bolting towards the storage cabinet, or at least where it would be if he were in Blue, ignoring the protests from his knee. It was there, near the backside of the cockpit, though the door was warped from impact and a pain in the ass to wrangle open. Due to the angle of Red's head, the cabinet was now where the ceiling should be, door facing downward, so that when he finally wrenched it open all matter of things came tumbling out, nearly pegging him on the head. After rummaging through a series of random electronics, an honest to god flashlight, and plastic baggies of disgusting food goo in cube form, he finally got his hands on the first aid kit, recognizable not by the label, as his Altean was still severely lacking, but because Coran had given them a basic rundown of ship inventory. Bless Coran.

Flashlight in tow, Lance scrambled back to Keith's side and flipped open the kit. Well, shit, now that his brain had caught up to him, he realized that he couldn't really bandage the wounds until the glass had all been removed. And how was he even supposed to bandage this, just cover Keith's whole face in wrap like he was preparing a mummy for burial? Wait, on further inspection, there wasn't actually any gauze in the box. What the hell? Lance hissed under his breath and trained the flashlight on Keith, light casting an eerie blue glare over his face, and tentatively went to work extracting and dusting away the shards scattered there. There was a nasty piece embedded in his lower lip, punctured through, and as he was pulling it free, Keith stirred. 

As he was trying to get out a “welcome back, don't move,” Keith moved. Because Keith never fucking did as he was told.

In one swift movement, he raised an arm to shield his eyes from the blinding light Lance was pointing at him, and in turn knocked Lance's hand to the side. The glass in his fingers slid across Keith's face and made a fresh cut before he could react. Lance winced and pulled his hands away.

“Where am I?” Keith blurted, eyes wide and voice frantic but slurred. He shot up to a sitting position and swayed dangerously, catching himself with his hands and then squeezing shut his eyes against pain. 

“Take it easy,” Lance said, but Keith was now attempting to get to his feet. Lance sprung up and loomed over him, hands hovering preventatively over Keith's shoulders. His knee complained at that. “Nooononono...you aren't going anywhere, man.”

“The Galra, they got...” Keith trailed off as he looked up at Lance, and his expression seemed to relax, and then turn to contemplation. A three second staring contest ensued before Keith was at it again.

“Keith, no,” he warned, brow furrowed as he watched him struggling to stand. “You need to lay down, or sit, anything but what you're about to do.”

“I'm okay. Is this...are we in Red?”

“Firstly, you probably have a concussion since you were out so long, and secondly, your face is a mess. So yeah, you don't look so good, and sure, that's something I'd usually say but I seriously mean it this time,” Lance paused, reconsidering, “-a-and not that I don't always mean it. But you look like you got into a fight with a windshield and lost. Like you went into the fight using your face as a weapon and thought that was gonna go just fine.” Somewhere in his speech Keith had seemed to take this into consideration, because he was now sitting back on his knees, unmoving, but looking at the ground with narrowed eyebrows. Honestly, if the evidence wasn't clearly in front of him, Lance might've not even known the guy had anything wrong with him, because after that initial slip-up, Keith was showing no signs that he was in pain. The almighty Keith was too cool for pain. 

Yeah, Lance was worried, and that worry was only working to increase his agitation and frustration.

“We need to get you patched up. Are you hurting anywhere else?”

“I can take care of it,” he replied, as though on instinct, because after dispiritedly raising a hand to his face, he laid back down with a shaky exhale, very clearly not taking care of it. 

Lance decided this was as much of a green light as he was going to get, and resumed the tedious task of glass removal, despite the unease it set in his stomach, and Keith didn't complain. 

“What happened?” Keith asked.

“Well, there was the wormhole,” he began, “And then floating through the beautiful but terrifying void of space, saw you cruising by, yelled into the comm for an hour but someone didn't have their helmet on until the last minute, and then you crash landed on the closest planet which thankfully doesn't seem to want to kill us – yet.” A thought came to him then, and proceeding guilt, that if he hadn't gotten Keith's attention to put his helmet back on he may be better off now. 

“I don't know anything about the others, though,” he added, quietly. Keith said nothing. 

Satisfied that all the glass had been removed, Lance began a thorough investigation of the first aid kit. It held an array of small round containers and liquid filled bottles, a few syringe-esque tools, a rag, some other random crap. He opened a container that had a blue, creamy substance inside and sniffed at it. It smelled like bananas. 

“I don't remember that,” Keith said. “Crashing, I mean.” 

“Oh,” was all Lance said. Was that a sure sign of concussion? Like a severe one? Were you supposed to remember things that happened the instant before you went unconscious? He didn't really know. Lance remembered, when he pushed Coran out of the way. And when he came to consciousness and heroically shot Sendak, securing their victory. And when Keith held his hand and Lance told him they made a good team. When he was too caught up in the moment to remember to hate Keith. Embarrassing, but he knew it was true; despite everything, they had synergy. 

“What are you doing?” Keith inquired, an edge to his voice. 

“Trying to find disinfectant or something. I don't really know what any of this is. It's all Altean to me.” Lance squinted at a label, and made out the words “two” and “give,” then shrugged before tossing it back in.

“You don't know?”

“How would I know? Do you know?” Lance said defensively. 

“Let me see,” Keith snapped.

Lance crossed his arms and looked offended. “Be my guest.”

Keith sat up, with more care this time, and turned to begin rummaging through the kit. After not even ten seconds, he grabbed the rag and held up some weird, fairly thin rubbery pad things. Lance raised an eyebrow at them. 

“I think they're band-aids,” Keith said, sounding uncertain. He started dabbing the blood from his face with the rag, and Lance snagged one of the so-called band-aids.

“How...exactly?” He flipped it over. The other side was some soft white material, not quite cloth, but the telling part was that it seemed to be attaching to his skin. He couldn't really imagine what other purpose it would serve, but you never knew with aliens. “Huh, you might be right. For once.”

“Right,” Keith muttered. “Can you put them on now?” 

Lance looked at him, and scowled because his face was still encrusted and smeared with blood in too many places but, there was only so much you could do with one measly rag and no water. Ah...water, that was a thing they needed. Another problem for another time.

“You're not going to disinfect it, really?”

Keith looked like he wanted to roll his eyes. “I've had plenty of cuts before, didn't clean them, they healed fine. And we don't even know what any of this is.“ He gestured to the first aid kit. “Just put them on.”

“Okay, alright, sorry for worrying. Don't say I didn't try when your face becomes a giant pus factory.”

Keith gave him a tired but all too fond smile that made Lance want to melt. Instead, he pressed a space band-aid to Keith's face. There were varying sizes, some large, so it only took four to properly cover everything, with Keith just barely flinching at each touch. Lance leaned back to admire his handiwork. Keith stood up and began walking away, and maybe it was just a trick of the dim light, but his gait looked unsteady. 

“Hey, where are you going?” Lance asked accusingly, aiming his flashlight at Keith's retreating form like a spotlight. 

To Lance's surprise, he actually turned around, and then recoiled. “Can you stop blinding me with that thing?” 

“Whoops.” Lance grinned and angled the beam further down. And then slumped a bit. And frowned. Because he had no idea what to do now. He thought back to Blue, how he didn't even know if she was...herself, that he was hesitant to reach out for fear of rejection from someone he trusted so much. It reminded him that he'd forgotten to ask, “is...is Red okay?”

“I don't know.” Keith narrowed his eyebrows and started pacing, while Lance kept the light trained on him every step. “I don't know, Lance, does it look like they're okay?” He threw up his hands in a broad gesture to the cockpit, filled with rubble and riddled with destruction, which yeah, sure, great point, but that wasn't what he meant.

“Yeah, I hadn't noticed,” Lance said dryly. “I meant okay, like...mentally. Y'know?”

Keith paused mid-stride and crossed his arms, looking off to the side as though deep in thought. “Red's ignoring me. I think they're mad.”

Lance cleared his throat. “Just a thought, maybe it has something to do with...piloting her straight into the ground?” 

“I didn't-,” he growled, then stopped, composing himself. “Before we...crashed, after coming out of the wormhole, they started...screaming at me. It felt like they were hitting me, physically, mentally. It hurt.”

“What happened then?” 

“I woke up. You were talking to me. Then I woke up again, here.” Keith ran his hands through his hair and groaned. 

“Hey, don't get so beat up about it. I'm sure she'll come around soon.” Or not so soon, since Red was possibly more stubborn than even Keith. 

“I know she will. I just have a splitting headache. And...” he trailed off, closing his eyes. 

Lance let the silence draw out, curious as to whether that thought would ever be finished, when another voice quietly crept into the room. A child crying. It sounded very faint and far off, but Lance nearly peed himself because this was some horror-movie level shit that he was not prepared for. He glanced around the room, and then at Keith, who was still pondering the meaning of life, entirely too oblivious.

“Do you...hear something?” 

“Is this another fart joke,” Keith said flatly. 

“Oh come on, that was one time! I'm serious! Listen.” Keith raised one eyebrow skeptically but appeared to be trying.

It was growing in strength, powerful and pained wailing. But it didn't send chills down his spine – it was...sad, pervasively tragic. It was familiar somehow, too, yet he couldn't pinpoint why, and ooooow holy crow it was loud. He had flashbacks to when he was younger and fruitlessly tried to ease his baby sister's screaming fits, which were guaranteed to draw blood from all ears within a 30 foot radius.

“I hear it,” Keith said, his hand going to his bayard. 

“Really?! It's about time 'cuz I can barely hear you over this weird space baby crying its brains out!”

“What? The only baby here is you, Lance,” Keith muttered. “Come on, let's go.” He turned away and started picking his way through the wreckage, towards the exitway of Red's gaping jaws. 

“Oh yeah? You're just jealous of my baby-soft skin!” Lance retorted, hauling himself from the ground. “Where are we going and why?” 

“There's something out here, and it's coming our way. It sounds big.” 

Lance had no idea what he was talking about. He couldn't hear anything like that over the crying – and he didn't understand how Keith couldn't hear that, was Lance losing his mind, was it some kind of telepathic message – but he could feel it now, what Keith was talking about, in the ground, like slow footfalls but enormous and earth-quaking.

“What?! So we're just going to run out there like a bunch of goons? Keith, we don't have the lions, we don't have Voltron!” Lance protested, even as he was limping after Keith. “All we have are these dinky bayards! No offense bayard, I didn't mean it like that but – Keith, are you even listening?”

Keith whipped his head around, brow furrowed. “What do you mean we don't have the lions? We have Blue!” 

Lance started and smiled grimly. “Uh, yeah, abooout that...” 

“What?” Keith had just reached the end of Red's maw and was peering around the corner. Lance hobbled up behind him to look out as well. The dust clouds seemed to have settled a bit, or drifted elsewhere, so Lance could clearly see that it was Blue, halfway down the slope of the crater made by the crash's impact. She was slinking along towards Red, tail lowered. 

And then it clicked. It just hadn't felt the same way, it didn't feel like the mental link he was used to. In fact, Blue had never so much talked to him so much as imparted to him an expanse of refined feelings and concepts that helped guide his hand. With Blue, she melded so naturally with him that it felt like her feelings were his, in a way. This was different, but he was sure that it was Blue crying, and that broke his heart. 

She stopped in her tracks like a deer caught in headlights and swiveled her large head towards them. The crying stopped abruptly and left a ringing silence in its wake, like she was trying to stifle it and hide away. Lance tried to send thoughts of acceptance and comfort to her, but he just couldn't find the link. He felt lost. It had been so intuitive before that he'd never had to focus on it.

“Lance, what did you mean about Blue?” Keith asked slowly.

“I don't know...I can't talk to her, or maybe she isn't listening, but I can hear her. She's sad...a-and scared and I can't do anything about it! She didn't even let me out when we landed, I had to use the escape hatch.” 

Keith knitted his brow, and they both stared at Blue for a few moments, who hadn't moved an inch.

“I think the Galra did something to those portals. It's affecting our lions,” Keith said. Of course, that was a conclusion that had crossed Lance's mind a while ago. What exactly had it done, though? Was it possible to sever the bond between paladin and lion? Or to alter and manipulate the mind of the lions?

Was it possible to turn a paladin's own lion against them? 

Lance found himself walking towards Blue, and then running haphazardly, trying to favour his bad leg, until he was there, breathing heavily and mere feet from her towering form. He was reminded of the feeling he'd had when he first saw her, when it had inexplicably felt as though she had been watching him. 

Lance placed his hand on her paw, a light and affectionate touch. “Hey...” he said softly.


End file.
